generation limbo: 20-somethings today, debt, unemployment, the questionable value of a college education

yes, and mostly because it uses an absolute measure

http://s3.amazonaws.com/data.tumblr.com/tumblr_m25k309cui1qzsvqyo1_1280.png

hey look almost all americans have almost everything, nobody is poor

http://i.imgur.com/7Umll.png

oh wait nvm

I don't see brunch on your graph

yeah okay the thing is very, very few people are in $50,000 of debt because of their brunch addictions, you do not hear people talking about how brunch is on a path to bankrupt the american government. one girl spending $15 on a meal once and feeling guilty about it does not reveal very much about anything. she could have said 'a shirt'.

like if you want to imagine some perfect poverty case who has never, ever in their entire life spent a dollar on anything frivolous, sure, go for it, but those people do not exist in america. and while euler might be in favor of welfare offices being run by philosopher kings who judge 'merit' on a case by case basis it really is cheaper and easier to just define 'poor' by relative income adjusted for cost of living

euler have you ever read road to wigan pier?

well I thought I made clear that I'm not advocating welfare offices actually judging individual cases by merit, and that I agree it should basically be cost-of-living-adjusted relative income, or some threshold based on cost-of-living.

FWIW though I think we as a society need to start to tamp down on the too-widely-held dream of a "cool job," and the idea that you can just do whatever you love and live the lifestyle you want from it. I don't think that a person who is poor as a result of pursuing that dream should be barred from public assistance, but I think we are selling a lot of young people a bill of goods.

the problem isn't the lack of cool jobs the problem is the lack of uncool jobs

'wigan pier' has a lot of faults but i feel like before anyone ever has an opinion about social benefits they should be forced to read it. relevant passage: 'i doubt, however, whether the unemployed would benefit if they learned to spend their money more economically. for its only the fact that they are not economical that keeps their allowances so high... [o]ur unemployment allowances, miserable though they are, are framed to suit a population with very high standards and not much notion of economy. if the unemployed learned to be better managers they would be visibly better off, and i fancy it would not be long before the dole was docked correspondingly.'

the problem isn't the lack of cool jobs the problem is the lack of uncool jobs

― iatee, Wednesday, April 11, 2012 6:37 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I agree, I just don't know if a person trying to make a living from writing for Brokelyn is a result of "the problem" or incidental to it.

'we as a society need to start to tamp down on the too-widely-held dream of a "cool job,"'

I do remember some PSA commercials from childhood exhorting me to become an astronaut, but can't think of a single thing since. all the commercials around now seem to revolve around becoming an electrician or a dental assistant.

The problem with putting the brakes on the idea of a "cool job" is that you've then forfeited creative pursuits to the wealthy (and, tbh, that's already happened for the most part) and I'm not sure that further dividing opportunities by class is a wonderful thing.

and, this is kinda thinking longer-term, but outside of careers that require highly technical skillsets, creative pursuits are basically the only other thing that can't be outsourced or automated

nah Lamp, never heard of it, but I'll look it up!

one thing I've gotten clearer about by means of this thread is that I need to get clearer how "pragmatic" or "technocratic" arguments for the welfare state are best interwoven with "moral" arguments; I mean talking this shit out helps me get clearer on what I'm confused about; so I've come around on thinking that the technocratic arguments miss the point.

though still lol @ "I cited a statistic, I can't be wrong"

nah my point was that relative poverty is just an arbitrary static that doesn't have to relate to consumption, if the bottom 20% of the population is 'relatively poor' then it doesn't matter how much brunch they eat etc. etc.

I have gotten in w/ you on this before but there is no 'argument for the welfare state'. 'the welfare state' is not something that can exist in a vacuum, it's just a way of framing some aspects of government spending. gov't spending is 40% of the american gdp - not really that far behind a lot of countries w/ 'huge socialist welfare states' - we just spend our money in poor and ineffective ways, often because we're afraid to admit how much of it is 'welfare'.

This is an interesting model: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welfare_state#Three_worlds_of_the_welfare_state

Hadn't heard of the 'three worlds' model before. (Fwiw, the US is the least welfare-state-ish of the welfare states according to that model.)

The problem with putting the brakes on the idea of a "cool job" is that you've then forfeited creative pursuits to the wealthy

I think the issue is that either we need to take concrete steps to actually make creative careers feasible for the general population (cf arts funding in Northern Europe) or we need to stop telling kids that they can do anything they set their minds to.

although it may in fact be true that no one tells this to kids anymore

IDK I lived in an environment where school, parents, everyone said 'just live with your parents and go to the cheap state university and get a nursing degree or a pharmacy degree so you can live comfortably.' But if you're one of those dummies like me that thinks as a teenager ART MATTERS and a LIFE OF THE MIND MATTERS and also that you have to go to college ––––– then your whole college career plays out like that one nightmarish scene in Mary Poppins where they want to spend money on feeding the pigeons, except instead of a small amount of money on feeding the pigeons, it's thousands on an illustration degree.

What I'm saying is humanities-minded teenagers entering college may not be very prone to pragmatic messages coming from boring asshole adults.

I'm still not tbh! God damn me.

well lots of boring asshole adults also might not actually know that much about the job market or what it will be like 20 years from now

Schools should really start hiring soothsayers, it's true.

'BEHIND THE EAGLE'S NEST A GREAT ASHE HATH FALLEN'
'So...nursing's a bad career then?'

IDK I lived in an environment where school, parents, everyone said 'just live with your parents and go to the cheap state university and get a nursing degree or a pharmacy degree so you can live comfortably.' But if you're one of those dummies like me that thinks as a teenager ART MATTERS and a LIFE OF THE MIND MATTERS and also that you have to go to college ––––– then your whole college career plays out like that one nightmarish scene in Mary Poppins where they want to spend money on feeding the pigeons, except instead of a small amount of money on feeding the pigeons, it's thousands on an illustration degree.

― does Red Stripe work like poppers? (Abbbottt), Wednesday, April 11, 2012 9:37 PM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

What I'm saying is humanities-minded teenagers entering college may not be very prone to pragmatic messages coming from boring asshole adults.

― does Red Stripe work like poppers? (Abbbottt), Wednesday, April 11, 2012 9:38 PM (44 seconds ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Well, yeah, I'm probably the extreme example of this tbh.

(Paid for my first two degrees though.)

Still, it seems much rarer for someone in India to pursue a PhD in music composition, no matter how art-minded they are. So what's the difference?

I guess the educational cost is the real problem. There's no reason it should cost $120,000 to develop the writing skills and cultural capital to become a freelance internet journalist, and if it didn't, people would be more free to try it, fail and retrain at something else.

yup

I'm probably just bitter at my classically unrealistic boomer parents, who not only gave me bad advice but are not in great financial shape themselves, in part as a result of living their advice.

I know people who sincerely advocate that we should stop or at least greatly reduce the funding for non-practical degrees. (Virtually all schools are 'state schools' here.) While this basically goes against everything I stand for, this would at least be one way of addressing the situation.

3xpost

I mean that cost though is a really bizarre historical anomaly. It seems like a total market failure.

The $120K figure is a reference to an article posted earlier? Is that just tuition (at a private school obv)?

$120K was just taking a stab at what an NYU student might take on in loans. NYU costs much more than that in tuition alone, not to mention high COL in New York.

yeah 'market failure' is the right word here. higher ed has managed to 'compete' on everything but price because it's such a hard to define and measure investment.

I think there has always been a veblen good aspect to it too - expensive schools feel 'worth it' because they are expensive schools

I think the loan industry is a big part of the distortion too, just like it was in the housing bubble.

yeah I think it also compares well w/ the health care crisis in that it's easy to confuse 'best in the world' w/ 'wait we were just spending exponentially more money on this'

(I can't actually say I regret my choices though so I'm not even sure what my point was now.)

There's no reason it should cost $120,000 to develop the writing skills and cultural capital to become a freelance internet journalist, and if it didn't, people would be more free to try it, fail and retrain at something else.

That still requires a middle-class with the income and time to do these things and that's probably the real hurdle.

The way my life is going, I think I can pull it off, but I also don't want to have kids. Not because of the free time/income, but that's a nice bonus.

well this is sorta a different issue but a lot of 'freelance internet journalists' coulda had full-time gigs in the same field in a previous generation. a lot of this is due to bigger structural changes - it's probably easier than ever to get paid *some money* to do *some writing* but harder than ever to get a job w/ health insurance if you want to sell your writing abilities.

'sell your writing abilities' sounds awkward but I didn't want to say ~be a writer~

that previous generation was a historical anomaly, though, right?

well post-ww2 america was def a situation that isn't coming back anytime soon, idk if I'd say anomaly, but the economy is definitely changing in some fundamental ways - globalizing, digitizing, trending towards contract labor - that are going to be 'the new normal'

and some people are gonna benefit a lot from the new normal, the 'winners' are gonna win even more than they did in the old normal. apple is kinda digging the new normal, for example. but we have a culture and political system rooted in the old normal - 'you get health insurance from your job.' 'you live one place for lon periods of time.' 'you can always find some decent-paying work if you get desperate.'

long periods*

'you live one place for lon periods of time.'

What is the feasible alternative to this?

(Afaict, I'm living the alternative but it doesn't feel very feasible.)

re. moving a lot, we're moving this spring & having to sell a house & I wouldn't want to do this super often b/c we've acquired bullshit that has to be moved & the house has to be maintained & it's all very complicated, & if we were just renters & didn't have much stuff it would be sooooooooo much easier (I'm not talking about the psychological burdens, which obviously vary a lot)---but if we're gonna rely heavily on consumption & housing then a nation of renters without much stuff is tricky---guess American corporations are relying on Asian consumption rising enough to make up for our losses but still